Thư viện tri thức trực tuyến
Kho tài liệu với 50,000+ tài liệu học thuật
© 2023 Siêu thị PDF - Kho tài liệu học thuật hàng đầu Việt Nam

The Global Cultural Capital
Nội dung xem thử
Mô tả chi tiết
The Contemporary City
Series Editors
Ray Forrest
Lingnan University
Hong Kong
Richard Ronald
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
In recent decades cities have been variously impacted by neoliberalism,
economic crises, climate change, industrialization and post-industrialization and widening inequalities. So what is it like to live in these contemporary cities? What are the key drivers shaping cities and neighborhoods?
To what extent are people being bound together or driven apart? How do
these factors vary cross-culturally and cross nationally? This book series
aims to explore the various aspects of the contemporary urban experience
from a firmly interdisciplinary and international perspective. With editors
based in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, the series is drawn on an axis
between old and new cities in the West and East.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14446
Mari Paz Balibrea
The Global Cultural
Capital
Addressing the Citizen and Producing the City
in Barcelona
Mari Paz Balibrea
Cultures and Languages
Birkbeck, University of London
London, United Kingdom
All quotes originally in Spanish and Catalan are provided in translation and were
translated by Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez
The Contemporary City
ISBN 978-1-137-53595-5 ISBN 978-1-137-53596-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53596-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935425
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Yury Zap / Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United
Kingdom
To my parents, in memoriam: Barcelonian lives without cultural
capital
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Still Paying Homage to Barcelona 1
Part I In Theory: The Subject of Culture
2 Theorizing Culture in the Creative City 13
Part II Taming the Political Citizen
3 Stories We Live By: ... and the Games Created the City 45
4 Culture Is to the Social Materialization of Democracy
as the Critical Subject Is to Democratic Citizenship 53
5 Building Participatory Measures 77
Part III The Olympic Framework
6 Preamble 103
7 Working for the City Image: Municipal Publicity
Campaigns Redefining the Preferred Barcelona Subject 107
vii
8 Exercising Democratic Citizenship: Sport
in the Run-Up to the Olympics 129
9 Rethinking Barcelona’92 as a Cultural Milestone 147
10 Olympic Volunteers: Rise of the Super-Citizen 163
Part IV Back to Work: Governing the Creative City
11 Volunteers Unbound 181
12 New Regimes of Government 191
13 Masterminds of Culture 203
Part V Be Yourself Out There: Inhabiting Barcelona
for the Global Market
14 Capital Subjects: Redefining Capitality in Global Films
on Barcelona 217
15 Barça in the New Millennium: The Other
Barcelona Model 235
Bibliography 273
Index 297
viii CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 4.1 “Cambia tu ciudad con los socialistas” (Change your city with
the socialists) 1979 Electoral campaign poster (PSOE, José
Ramón Sánchez) 70
Fig. 7.1 “Barcelona més que mai” (Barcelona more than ever before)
logo (Ajuntament de Barcelona) 109
Fig. 7.2 “Barcelona ’92” logo (COOB’92 S.A., 1988) 110
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Still Paying Homage
to Barcelona
Is there anything new remaining to be said about Barcelona? The city’s
international prestige is nowadays indisputable. It has become a commonplace in the European Cities Monitor – which lists the top European cities
for business expansion according to the opinion of senior executives from
leading businesses – to find Barcelona at the top of that list (Cushman and
Wakefield 2010) in the quality of life category.1 Equally, its stature as a
tourist destination does not even require an argument. Desiring Barcelona
comes for the potential visitor as naturally as breathing, its status endlessly
validated by armies of preceding tourists left in awe by its charms. In more
specialized circles, the ones this book now joins, saturation takes different
forms. Barcelona’s transformation in the post-Francoist period is widely
considered among architects, urban planners, and local politicians around
the world, as a model because of its perceived ability to reconcile economic
restructuring with spatial regeneration and the widening of the citizens’
right to the city (McNeill 1999; Kirby 2004; Marshall 2004a; Busquets
2005: 345–445).2 As such, the Barcelona case has been widely studied in
academic contexts and emulated across the world by policymakers and
other local institutional agents (González 2011). But no less abundant
have been the critical accounts of this transformation as the end of progressive urban life and the silencing of democratic voices at the service of
global capital.
In joining such a crowded scene, this book pays, once again, homage to
the exceptional Barcelona case and claims to illuminate previously untold
© The Author(s) 2017
M.P. Balibrea, The Global Cultural Capital, The Contemporary City,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53596-2_1
1
perspectives for its complex understanding. Thanks to previous studies,
our work does not need to explore in detail the ideological implications of
the so-called “Barcelona model,” but in another sense will go into much
more detail than any previous works on the scrutiny of institutional and
official political discourses, particularly those concerning culture. It has
also become a common-place to include Barcelona among the creative
cities and to accept as a given its use of culture for urban regeneration.
This book, rather than taking these statements for granted, investigates in
much more depth than has been the case so far the genealogy of cultural
discourses in Barcelona’s post-Francoist democratic municipalities up to
the end of the millennium. Its purpose is to identify, trace and make sense
of a transformation in the uses of culture, from being the terrain where
democracy materializes, to constituting the central economic asset of the
Barcelona brand. Furthermore, such an exploration is informed by a
theoretical preoccupation with the relation of subjects to power as
mediated by culture. Even more, this book proposes to consider Barcelona
as a privileged case study to understand how such relations are articulated.
After all, Barcelona’s local institutions were pioneers in becoming aware of
the close relationship between culture and the social and economic development of the city, and subsequently in implementing a new paradigm in
cultural policy for entrepreneurial creative cities (Rodríguez Morató 2005,
2008). It is within this new paradigm that, for local powers, a new conceptualization, not only of culture but also of the local residents would
become indispensable. The analysis of local government documents and
their organized events and products shows how they constructed and
disseminated ideas of and for the local population, the purpose of which
was to influence this population’s concept of itself and of its contribution
to the beneficial functioning and prosperity of life in the city. The
Barcelona case, therefore, provides in this book the basis for a theorization
of citizenship and cultural transformation, by arguing that the economic
and political logic of the creative city, with its ties to culture, is a key
paradigm for understanding how citizenship is defined in the neoliberal
urban context. This is different from the better-known framework of
identity used to discuss local citizenship in Barcelona and beyond. In
relation to cities, identity has been developed in greatly over the past
twenty years around issues of branding (Anholt 2007), that is, of the
need and desirability for local institutions to consciously produce a cohesive and attractive corporate identity for their cities that allows them to
compete successfully in the global market. From the viewpoint of their
2 1 INTRODUCTION: STILL PAYING HOMAGE TO BARCELONA
focus on identity, these studies take whole cities as their units of analysis,
and not only the ways in which citizens are incorporated into the brand.
Analogously, the turning of Barcelona into a global tourist brand as a
corollary to its exemplary transformation has attracted the attention of a
large number of scholars, either to praise or to criticize it (among the most
salient are: M. Delgado 2005, 2007; Etxezarreta et al. 1996; Marshall
2004a; McNeill 1999; Monclús 2003; Roca 1994; Vázquez Montalbán
1987). These studies, coming from human geographers, urban planners,
anthropologists, and intellectuals more generally, focus on the redefinition of a place, and particular perspectives have attracted more attention,
such as public spaces, in the work of M. Delgado or Degen, or architecture, in the work of Montaner and Muxí. References to how citizenship is
affected in this redefinition are frequent, signaling its importance, but not
systematic. This book takes a closer, more structured look at the relationship between the municipality and the local citizen. In so doing it revisits
the concepts and ideologies of consensus and participation, and pursues
their evolution from the pre- to the post-Olympic turning point. Our
argument seeks to make sense of the ways in which the Barcelona municipality, through its cultural discourses, established the terms of public
participation, how it invoked them, starting by connecting them with
ideas of critical citizenship coming from the anti-Francoist grassroots
movements, and pursuing the evolution of such ideas toward subsumption and consent.
The “cultural capital” of the title necessarily invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s
critique of it as a structural social axis of inequality, different amounts of
which individuals are invested with according to their class position.3 My
work does not deny the relevance of the concept so understood, or that
class inequalities continue to manifest themselves through culture in
Barcelona, via distinction and otherwise; in fact it considers itself to be
fully compatible with it. But my use of cultural capital puts a different
emphasis on the coming together in the subject of culture and capital that
shifts the focus to a Foucauldian, biopolitical approach to it. What I
mean to convey with my play on words is the advent of a qualitatively
different role for culture in postindustrial Barcelona, as an economic and
social discourse giving reason and meaning to the city through the production of a particular way of life, and therefore needing to involve all
citizens in the everyday production of itself as a cultural city. Which
explains why cultural policy documents are key to this book. Dominant
institutional discourses in postindustrial Barcelona will evolve to have
INTRODUCTION: STILL PAYING HOMAGE TO BARCELONA 3
culture at the core of the work they do to define and govern local
identity – “Barcelonianness” – because the survival of the Barcelona
image/brand, of which local people are an indispensable part, is what
sustains the city’s economy, and therefore the commodity that needs to
be produced and distributed, not only consumed in culture. The notion of
capitality certainly invokes Barcelona’s historical status as capital of the
Catalonian nation without a state, and in addition the many disputes
around its metropolitan centrality with respect to Spain. As capital of the
Catalan nation and claimant of a de facto Spanish co-capitality with
Madrid, democratic-era Barcelona has been the object of intense disputes
over the meaning of its geopolitical and symbolic belonging within
Catalonia, Spain, and Europe, a political debate with a large presence in
the cultural arena. Studies on collective identity involving Barcelona
have traditionally been framed by questions of (anti)nationalism and
Catalanism which address the importance of Barcelona as capital, and
the historical and political role of culture in its modern formation. But
our notion of capitality refers in the main, in the global market of cities
that Barcelona enters in the postindustrial moment, to the need to produce the city’s own qualitative advantage, uniqueness and unmatched
prominence without which it will not be able to sell and compete. I
claim that the manufacturing of such an advantage also endows
Barcelona with a form of fully monetarizable capitality, one which residents are supposed to own, and ceaselessly produce and reproduce. In that
sense, this book considers how culture, in the hands of local power,
contributed to the creation of a preferred citizen of Barcelona, not against
the horizon of Catalonia or Spain alone, but of the world as a whole.
Along with the transformation of the city’s image, soon to become a
brand, which would accompany socio-economic shifts and help differentiate Barcelona in the global market of cities, what changed too was the kind
of preferred citizen that the new situation generated, the city dweller
populating the global brand that Barcelona became.
SPORT AS CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY
Underlining the intersections of sport with culture will provide us with
valuable insights to our argument on citizens address. In the first instance,
its importance stems from the part that sport plays in conceptualizing an
improved society and citizens via the promotion of what are perceived as
highly esteemed cultural, physical, and moral values to be extended to the
4 1 INTRODUCTION: STILL PAYING HOMAGE TO BARCELONA
entire society. Cozens and Stumpf (1953) (1, quoted by Daniels 1966:
154) argue the anthropological common base shared by sports with widely
accepted artistic forms via their connection to play and leisure, a view that
can be found in the father of modern Olympism, the Marquis de
Coubertin. For structuralist anthropologists, the practice of sport implies
basic universal cultural, and even moral, values of socialization, functioning through a system of signs, of symbolic interactions such as victory and
defeat, force and weakness (Krawczyk 1980: 13), cooperation and fair play
(Lüschen 1967: 137), and the motivation to achieve, be it individual or
collective (Lüschen 1967: 133–134, 136). That being said, any discussion
of the relation of sport to culture is framed by their place in the particular
social circumstances (Lüschen 1967: 130). At the level of policy and
disciplinary recognition, the connection of sport to culture via their social
relevance is one characteristically made by the welfare state during the
period of growth and stability that followed the recovery of Western
economies at the end of World War II (Daniels 1966: 153), when both
become tools of social policy. The UNESCO-sponsored 1959 Helsinki
conference on Sport, Work, Culture defines sport as “an integral part of
modern culture ... [which] has important tasks to fulfil in education. Its
influence is not limited to sports fields but extends to many realms in the
modern, rapidly developing, world” (12, quoted in Daniels 1966: 157). It
is not surprising, then, to find sports mentioned as part of collective
democratic aspirations, as we will have an opportunity to see for the
Catalan case, in fact well before the postwar period, as well as in the lateFrancoist one.4 Moreover, sports in the twentieth century, or perhaps
more specifically the spectacle of sport, became a major area of popular
culture, along with fashion, TV, films, and advertising. For cultural critics,
sports, both practicing and watching them, are part of a common shared
culture, instantiating forms of expression and value systems capable of
incorporating the most disadvantaged citizens in the community. As
such, sports are easy vehicles of identity formation and integration, as we
will have an opportunity to study with regard to F.C. Barcelona. In
addition, such identity often invokes a kind of territorial allegiance (i.e.,
patriotism) that governments might try to use to their advantage by
associating people’s active sporting endorsement as a surrogate for participation on behalf of or in unison with the state (Houlihan 1997: 120–
121) or local government, as was the case with organizing the Olympic
Games for Barcelona. Finally, amalgamations of sports and the arts in
cultural policy as part of urban strategies are frequent nowadays, thanks
SPORT AS CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY 5
to sport’s ability to produce urban identity, evidence of participation in
communal culture and of turning sport arenas into city tourist landmarks.
All of which provides sport with considerable power to forge broadly based
support for spatial regeneration, Olympic Barcelona being an unsurpassable
example of this. In sum, sport is at a crossroad of cultural, political, social,
and urban discourses, and it is within that complexity that its role illuminates
the topics discussed in this book. In the discourse of grassroots movements
as well as political parties of the left in the 1970s, sport played an important
role as a trigger of the desired new democratic citizen. Sport joined cultural
concerns in the political call to make their significance extend to social
matters. Within the framework of what we can call a humanistic agenda,
the arts and sport were conceptualized as moving the democratic agenda
forward by promoting the fulfillment of every Barcelonian’s human capabilities, not only those of the privileged upper classes. At the beginning of the
democratic period, culture and sport were united by their capability to
produce active, participatory, healthy, democratic citizens, and civic communities. The practice of sport was a form of popular culture that the local
powers used to gather support, and to cement together all the other cultural
forms. In addition, crucially for our argument, the local government decisive
action on sports helped to de-emphasize the political component of citizenship that had characterized the materialization of democratic citizenship in
anti-Francoist struggles of the late dictatorship. Sport made promoting
expressions of solidarity that were akin to democratic values compatible
with the competitiveness characteristic of neoliberal times; the stimulation
of a participation and shared governance conduct with one of passive
spectatorship and voluntary service culminating in the Olympic Games.
This epitome of competitive sport provides a logic of performance/pleasure
that structures neoliberal subjectivity around two basic ideas: self-improvement and the overcoming of barriers (Dardot and Laval 2013: 282), and
which we will see confirmed in our analysis of F.C. Barcelona as a global
brand.
STRUCTURE OF THE WORK
Part I provides the theoretical framework for an argument on the centrality
of creative cities to frame and condition discourses – particularly cultural
ones – on citizenship in the transition from social democracy to neoliberalism. Part II focuses on the period framed by the coming to power of
democratic municipalities in 1979 and the celebration of the Olympic
6 1 INTRODUCTION: STILL PAYING HOMAGE TO BARCELONA